One of the many advantages of membership
in professional organizations and consortia is the opportunity for support in
our various job activities. For those of you with teaching/training responsibilities,
local and national professional organizations and consortia can often provide
you with a wealth of information.

LLNE

The LLNE website has several resources
that might be helpful for teaching. For example, do you want to teach a class
on a using the Internet for a particular type of legal research?

The RIPS SIS (Research Instruction
and Patron Services section) (http://www.aallnet.org/sis/ripssis/)
has many activities to support teaching/training, including collecting materials
for the National Legal Research Teach In kits.

The AALL Annual Meeting often has
programs/workshops related to teaching/training issues. Even if you are unable
to attend a session in person, you can always try to obtain the materials or
a recording. For example, just this past year in Orlando, you could attend a
program on creating practical research exams, connecting with your audience
(see a review of this program in the last issue of the newsletter at http://aallnet.org/chapter/llne/LLNENews/v22n3/connect.htm),
and using online tutorials to teach legal research. Moreover, LexisNexis had
their annual teaching research workshops, this year geared towards academic
librarians. See Stephanie Burke's article in the last issue of LLNE News at
http://aallnet.org/chapter/llne/LLNENews/v22n3/triall.htm.

NELLCO

NELLCO often provides training opportunities,
as well as a resource-sharing database.

Librarians as Writers of Teaching
Materials
The NELLCO Resource Sharing Database
by Janet Katz, Harvard Law School Library

Not only do librarians teach, they
also produce teaching materials, such as research guides, tutorials, pathfinders,
bibliographies and Webographies. Five years ago, NELLCO reference librarians
decided to devise a way to share such publications with each other. The goal
was to avoid duplication of effort, thus saving financial resources and promoting
both individual libraries and NELLCO. So began the NELLCO Resource Sharing Database,
found on the Web at http://www.Nellco.org/LegalResources.cfm

A quick inspection of the database
reveals over 200 records linked to Web guides on topics from war crimes to how
to change your name. The guides are excellent and each one is there for your
use: send a link to a student who is starting a research project; get ideas
for your next Web guide; add NELLCO guide links to your library's home page.

NELLCO librarians are invited: to
add new Web guides to the database; to update any old links that lead to disappointing
"Not Found" pages; to share ideas for improving the Database. NELLCO
Executive Director Tracy Thompson welcomes your input. You can reach her at
tracy.thompson@yale.edu

1. For an account of the project,
see Janet C. Katz, No One Person: Views on a Collaboration, 20 LEGAL REFERENCE
SERVICES QUARTERLY 105 (2001).

Other organizations

In addition to specifically law library
associations, other associations that can provide useful resources include:
SLA (Special Libraries Association) (http://www.sla.org),
ALA (American Association of Libraries) (http://www.ala.org),
ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) (a division of ALA) (http://www.acrl.org)
and ARL (Association of Research Libraries) (http://www.arl.org).